CyberBrokers AMA Recap 3.16.22
Thanks again to everyone who asked great questions in Discord for this week’s CyberBrokers AMA. Below is a paraphrasing of the Twitter Spaces edited for brevity and clarity. First, the team discussed the vision at a high level and then got into the nitty-gritty. Let’s get into it!
Thank You
Josie: To start off, I want to say a huge thank you and congrats to everyone involved with CyberBrokers. Seeing Brokers actually in your hands and what you're creating with them has been so rewarding. We've already seen some amazing community tools come out (peep Isotopes and CarTarL)!
#LessFloorMoreLore
Josie: There is always going to be talk of price. That's the space we're in. However that’s not our sole focus, and we will not be specifically addressing it. Price will obviously be based on the long-term things that we do. We are only 9 days out from the close of our sale, and although it is amazing where the community and the trades are at right now, we are not going to dwell on it, no matter how positive.
Wen Token/Reward
Josie: We had a lot of questions about different tokens/rewards that people may get by holding CyberBrokers. That's definitely not something we can talk about because that would make us a security, and we are not! Broadly, we can say that everything we have done in the past and will continue to do will be interconnected.
Core Pillar: Content
Josie: Our three core pillars are content, collectibles, and gaming. Firstmost, content is key. It will evolve and encompass everything as we move forward. Our content is not only going to be built internally, we want to build it with all of you. We plan to create more content around our storyline and universe, bringing what Chris is writing to life. From things as small and cool as audio Chapters with amazing voiceovers to building out more visual content.
Core Pillar: Collectibles (MirrorWare)
Josie: Many of you are excited about MirrorWare, the limited-edition goods brand we’ve been mentioning. MirrorWare will focus on digital fashion and be collaborative. As a metaverse-native brand, we want to be interoperable and collaborate with other projects and creators as much as possible, extending beyond our universe to make something really exciting. With that said, a lot of the collaborative nature that we want to achieve depends on how many other projects will allow us to be collaborative and how the space moves. It's something that we're working on, but this means our timeline is going to be determined and communicated more as we hire more team members.
Core Pillar: Gaming (Community Quests)
Chris: We're not going to make a large, complex video game because we don't want to take 3-5 years to build it. Instead, we want to get community-focused experiences out now. We want everybody to be able to participate, play, and use their CyberBrokers as soon as possible. In order to do that, we've created Community Quests.
Community Quests are monthly puzzles that the community must solve in a collaborative effort while simultaneously unraveling the story of CyberBrokers. What’s interesting is the results of the quests will be baked into future chapters of the story. Basically, it’s going to be a giant 10,000+ person D&D campaign. We don't know if it's ever been done at this scale!
We are inspired by some of the alternate reality games (ARGs) from the 90s, where you’d get a fax telling you that a “super-spy needs you to complete a mission.” It interweaved the game with real life. Similarly, we want to interweave all of this game and storytelling with our on-chain lives. We are basically all existing in a giant MMO right now, and we want to make quests for it that we can all play.
Importance of Interoperability
Ben: We are going to be using the terms interoperability and metaverse often, so it will help to define that from our point of view. Many people think of a particular 3D world like Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, The Sandbox, Somnium Space, or even the World Wide Web when they think of a metaverse. But the metaverse in our definition is the blockchain as an MMO - as coined by Chris. That has been our ethos in everything we do. It’s all about collaborating with other people, communities, builders, and creators. We don’t believe in competitors. We believe that unified we are a massive collection of I.P.s and brands that all together are stronger than Disney.
The metaverse for us is all of these projects and the people interconnected with them coming together. It’s not a product that we’re selling you, it’s the unification and the collaboration of everything, which is so much stronger than just one individual experience. And that is how I view CyberBrokers: it is a metaverse-native brand. It is born out of all of this. It lives in all of this. Literally, it lives on-chain. That is the core ethos to everything we do, and that is really where this is all going to start and where it’s all going to end.
Community Fund
Ben: We want to support the community and creators to build around and on top of CyberBrokers. In order to do that, we are allocating some of the funds we have raised specifically for community members to pitch ideas. If our team and other community members love it, we are going to pay them to actually build it. So it's not just going to be us building things, it’s going to be us supporting the community to build things as well.
Q: Will you be able to buy or sell certain properties or items from CyberBroker to CyberBroker? Will it change their rarity?
Josie: We 100% want to build tools that allow the community to customize their Broker in different ways, whether it is for profile pics, gaming, etc. We are planning a tool, like a closet, where you can change your CyberBrokers by putting different assets on them, allowing you to make new assets or uploading ones you already have. We will not be changing the original NFT because that would change its inherent value.
Q: Can you tell us more about Mind/Body/Soul levels? What do they do?
Chris: From the beginning, we always wanted CyberBrokers to be game assets. That's why they have stats, Talents, and Classes. If you squint, you can see MMO tunes. With that, we thought it would be really boring if we randomly generated numbers and it ended up in a nice pretty bell curve. If you have ever played D&D or tabletop RPGs, they allow players to roll dice for stats and take the best out of a few rolls. Taking inspiration from that, I went through each Class and tuned the number of dice they could roll. For example, I gave Creators a lot of “Soul dice” to roll, giving them a higher likelihood of having a higher Soul. It’s also possible to break Mind/Body/Soul into more traditional stats. For example, a 25 Body could be broken into 15 “strength” and 10 “dexterity.” We can use them as a sort of umbrella stat.
We’re going to use these stats in our Quests in a choose-your-own-adventure type of way. People can perform the correct actions that match with their particular Broker’s stats, influencing the outcome of certain things. We’re going to take all of that into effect as we build the games and the stories moving forward.
Q: What portion of revenue is the team investing back into the project?
Josie: A large majority is being reinvested back into the project. From day one, that was our initial plan with selling CyberBrokers and starting this universe - basically in lieu of a raise.
Q: Will you be hiring and expanding the team?
Josie: Obviously, a lot of our funds, in the beginning, will go to hiring key people to help us build out the universe.
Q: Will you be getting a Community Manager? Will there be Discord emojis and stickers?
Josie: Yes, we are definitely going to have some Community members step into those roles and help us with management. And yes, we will definitely have emojis and stickers so you guys can spam people with fun stuff.
Q: Why was putting CyberBrokers on-chain so important?
Ben: The on-chainness of CyberBrokers has been a mission-critical value since the beginning. We wanted to build something that can last. The philosophy behind it started to make a lot of sense over the years having built several games. At Neon District we built Plasma Bears, but the Loom Network, which was hosting the game, went down very suddenly. Discovering that things that are supposed to be permanent are actually not is a scary thing.
Putting the entirety of CyberBrokers art on Ethereum, not just a piece of it, was the only way to have the highest confidence that we would be able to give the art permanently, allowing the owners to truly own it. You want to know that when you own something like this and put it in a vault, you can get it back. People can be tweeting these things as historical artifacts in the future when the team is no longer here.
Q: How much did you spend putting art on-chain and why? Can you tell us about the process?
Ben: First off, everything is open-source. So if you are a developer and you want to see the code and ideas to borrow from, please do. If you want more technical detail, I will be making a write-up in the near future.
There were multiple iterations of building a compressor. The first version of the compressor was built in late 2020 using an earlier version of CyberBrokers and a different storage solution. From that point in time, I had already done many tests that would tell me how much it was going to cost to put on-chain based on the gas price.
Then in 2021, gas went crazy. We had NFT summer and DeFi summer. It was hectic and so were gas prices. The thought of trying to put any of this on-chain was scary. We figured it would have been between 790 to 1500 ETH, assuming everything was as compressed as possible.
We were super happy that ultimately we got it down to 91 ETH (79 for the SVGs and 12 for metadata). We luckily were able to push almost everything up on-chain overnight during a weekend in the United States. They are compressed multiple times down with a custom SVG participant compressor. We wanted to use as little space as possible while still providing the full fidelity of the work.
Q: Can you tell us more about the artwork and any influences you had?
Josie: Huge shout out to Azamat. (Go follow him!) We collaborated on the entire collection of CyberBrokers and we will continue to work together moving forward. He is amazing.
It took us a while to get the style down. The very first iterations we had were from the shoulder up. As we saw more things come onto the market and realized we wanted to put everything on-chain, our style evolved. After all, you can’t tell someone's personality from just the shoulders up! We wanted people to have the full experience of their clothes, accessories, weapons, etc.
One of the first Brokers Azamat and I created was a Cammer. That’s why I like Cammers and bunny masks so much.
Q: Did the art need to be modified for the on-chain aspect?
Josie: Yes, that was definitely a consideration. It started with sketches and drawings and then needed to be converted to SVGs, which is not something that we could easily do with a program. Every single asset - around 1,400 - was hand-drawn, converted into SVGs, and modified. It transformed into what we have now: vector shapes that create larger shapes with gradients and colors. It took quite some time, but I’m really happy with how everything turned out.
Q: Do the laws of the CB Universe need to be considered when creating lore contributions? What is the lore inspiration?
Chris: I’m going to act as sort of a curator and editor-in-chief. We obviously want everything to be relatively cohesive. We want the Talents and Classes to play a big part. That being said, it would be very boring if everything we created as a community sounded like me.
My inspirations include Ready Player One, Snow Crash, and Neuromancer. I’m a huge William Gibson fan. Plus, I took a heavy dose of blockchain and tried to imagine what this space would be like in a couple of hundred years. Regardless, I think we all want to adhere to the same laws of the universe that way it can easily be folded in and we can cross-reference.
Q: Some CyberBrokers have errors, such as not having backgrounds. Why?
Josie: On the first day of the launch, I noticed tiny things that were not exactly how I imagined. But after a couple of days, seeing people post their CyberBrokers and get really excited about their uniqueness, it made me realize what would be considered errors were part of their beauty. We've decided we are not going to really change those things. For example, there are some CyberBrokers that don't have backgrounds, and that’s pretty cool. Put whatever background you want on it - some of your photography or art. I think those are actually happy accidents. It imitates life.
Q: Why isn’t there a trait for backgrounds?
Josie: We didn't want backgrounds to play into rarity rankings. In our eyes, they are a cosmetic enhancement.
Q: Will there be an official Rarity list or rarity tools?
Josie: We are not going to release anything official because a lot of things are subjective. However, we will be releasing an unofficial guide based on Talents, Species, and Class to give you a starting point to create your own view on the rarity.
The anchor trait is Talent. Some Talents often have similar themes and a mix of traits, such as gear and clothes. If you look at all of the Incumbents, for example, they all have a fishbowl head. Many Leftovers have traits that are really interesting from a traditional rarity ranking point of view. The large majority of CyberBrokers are not Leftovers so they are actually a minority in the set as a whole. Sprinkling in stats and Class, you start to see how everything fits together and a traditional rarity ranking of the entire set doesn't work very well. That's a large part of why we don't have an official rarity list. We anchor it to the Talents and then secondarily on their individual traits.
Q: Will you be collaborating within games or different worlds that already exist?
Ben: If a collaboration totally makes sense, we're open to it. We're definitely in some ways forging our own path. I worked on Neon District, Blockade, and other games, and Chris has worked at Decentraland, The Sandbox, etc., so we're familiar with all these different projects where people can collaborate, build assets, and have assets that live across worlds and also represent I.P. within different worlds.
We’re going to focus on how to make an asset that provides all of the different multimedia files to work in all different worlds. Part of that is making sure that the assets that particular platforms accept are the same ones that we can provide them. In other words, we’ll work on ways to bring projects together with unified standards. Being able to have the ability to take your CyberBrokers and enjoy another experience elsewhere will be incredible.
Q: Will there be a CyberBrokers collab with Neon District?
Ben: That is a topic of future conversation and obviously is something that is very much under our control. We will revisit that in the future.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about the rights for CyberBrokers?
Chris: We set out from the beginning to be very permissive in our licensing. We are creating a specific license where CyberBrokers own the I.P. and trademark, however, we are granting everybody a full license to do whatever they want with it. This ensures we still retain the rights to make sure that nobody does terrible things with our stuff because nobody in the community wants that.
We trust that you guys are going to shepherd that as if you own it with us. If you want to create a brand off of your collected CyberBrokers and earn $1 million dollars on selling merch, that’s awesome! That’s not something we're going to shut down. Put your CyberBrokers into your art, put different clothes on them, do whatever you want!
We want to make it difficult for anything to affect CyberBrokers. CyberBrokers will have a lot of official art, but we can also fold the community into the I.P., like in the stories. If you look at it in crypto terms, we're doing proof-of-stake and want as many validating nodes as possible. So if by some crazy chance Ben, Josie, and I are in a plane crash and somebody else takes over, they must work with all of this existing stuff that's out there. It further strengthens the I.P. As far as the document, we're now just down to the last couple of red lines with the lawyers!
More Soon
Stay tuned for more news on the upcoming quest, and be on the lookout as we will try to do an event in New York at NFT.NYC.
Just like you guys are bullish on CyberBrokers, we are bullish on the community that we are building. Thank you to everyone who tuned in to the AMA live and asked some great questions. Forgive us if there are some we couldn't cover, but you can always post again in Discord, and we'll try our best to answer as fast as possible.
Stay Spicy!